Mahadev Desai Quotes & Sayings

The venerable emeritus professors still at Yale when I entered graduate school [in the 1960s] may have been reserved, puritanical WASPs, but they were men of honor who had given their lives to scholarship. Today in the elite schools, honor and ethics are gone. — Camille Paglia

Like most ghetto kids I knew it was important to be 'somebody' so I became a good soccer player, because excelling at a sport seemed to make you special. — Vidal Sassoon

That evening, Hope wrote a letter to her MP, Jack Crow. She found no difficulty at all in composing it, but quite a bit in writing it. She hadn't hand-written an entire page since primary school. In the end she found an app on her glasses that sampled her handwriting and turned it into a font that looked like her handwriting would if it had been regular, and printed it off. There was even an app for the printer that indented the paper a little, and an ink that looked like ballpoint ink. — Ken MacLeod

During my sixteen years as a teacher of writing, I removed many adverbs and adverbial phrases from students' writing. I decided long ago that a writer who needlessly modifies words is either a nervous writer who does not believe in the worth of what they are writing or a vain writer who wants to be seen as discriminating and sensitive to nuances or meaning. — Gerald Murnane

One of the things that therapists do if you are suicidal, like a trick, is ask you about the future. They want to know what your plans are. Do you want to be the president? Do you want to be a rock star? They want to know if you want to live later even if you want to die now. — Albert Borris

Revolutionaries are not infallible. — Tariq Ali

EXISTENCE, n. A transient, horrible, fantastic dream,/ Wherein is nothing yet all things do seem:/ From which we're wakened by a friendly nudge/ Of our bedfellow Death, and cry: "O fudge!" — Ambrose Bierce